Commentary on development, globalization, and trade by Jonathan Dingel.

TAFTA?

This blog has a long history of covering preferential trade, as the title suggests. But I don’t follow proposed trade deals very much these days, largely because serious trade proposals haven’t been forthcoming in recent years.

If I had been paying attention, I would have noticed “a slow and steady effort to generate support for a U.S.-EU free trade agreement” “over the past year or so”, as noted by Simon Lester. At the WaPo, David Ignatius reports/opines:

But a big idea is taking shape that could revitalize the U.S.-European partnership for the 21st century. It was the talk of Berlin and Hamburg when I was there a week ago, and there’s a similar buzz in Washington. The idea is free trade — specifically, a trans-Atlantic free-trade agreement — which I’ll optimistically call “TAFTA.”
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tipped the U.S. hand on Nov. 29 when she said at the Brookings Institution, “We are discussing possible negotiations with the European Union for a comprehensive agreement that would increase trade and spur growth on both sides of the Atlantic.”…
Curious as to whether Clinton’s speech was just window dressing from a departing secretary, I asked the White House this week whether the TAFTA talk is real. The answer was yes: Obama is considering making a trans-Atlantic trade initiative an important part of his second-term agenda. Combined with the North American Free Trade Agreement in Latin America and the ­Trans-Pacific Partnership in Asia, this could create a global trading system that might be an enduring part of Obama’s legacy.

Given (my uninformed impression of) current trade politics in the US, I see little reason to take TAFTA seriously at this stage. The Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations have been going for about five years (with 15 rounds of formal negotiations over the last three years), so I’d be shocked if there were any accelerated action on the TAFTA front.